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The False Dream of Cottagecore | How the problematic romanticization of Western rural life reveals our discontent with the modern world
(beneaththepavement.substack.com)
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I live a version of "living in the woods" and there is no way to do the white girl hobbit lifestyle without massive modern infrustructure. Also, the amount of resource management destroys any aesthetic satisfaction. You are essentially camping with a house. It eats up all your time and then you are supposed to have time to what? Simplify?! Yeah, nah, gotta pay the bills too. So, you still have all the problems of modern living but with the extra complication making it work far from society. All for a whimsical aesthetic?
The cold reality is this is not a cinematic experience. Its stressful, unscheduled, chaotic, and not always rewarding. I'm the IT for our home network and internet, the lumberjack/arborist, the landscaper, the plumber, the water filtration expert, small engine repair tech, concrete, framing, roof, electrical, HVAC...etc. There are a few of these services I could outsource, but then I'm babysitting contractors who usually don't know what they are dealing with or refuse to travel this far.
Living in a cute little cottage with a cutesy greenhouse or vegetable plot and a goat and some chickens sounds like some beginning to a romance novel. Instead you will be dealing gophers destroying your just tilled rows and foxes eating your chickens. You'll be at home depot all the time and farm supply for feed. You'll end up getting a tractor, so diesel will fill the fresh air. A water main will break in the middle of the night and the septic tank will fill up. The power will go out everytime there is a big storm. The shear amount of work and maintenance it takes is neverending and always growing. You'll be doing so many chores that curling up next to a fire with a glass of wine and a good book will sound like a laughable affectation.
Unless you are independently wealthy, there is no way to have this whimsical fantasy of a lifestyle. Chances are, the people who want/promote it would be bored out of their minds inside a week and wouldn't survive it for more than a month.
I grew up in the suburbs and married a girl from a town of 700 and moved to a slightly larger town. My in-laws have a hobby farm and largely do all of their own maintenance, and the whole place is constant chores to keep in good order, and that's when nothing's broken.
I'll put it this way, while clearing several inches of snow in -10 degree weather the tractor broke down and would not move, so my father in law had to hand shovel the rest of the driveway plus a path around the stuck tractor to be able to get to work and then fix the tractor in the middle of the driveway until it ran well enough to get into the unheated machine shed where he's at least not working in the cold wind. Oh and there's more snow coming in a couple of days so better hope he gets it fixed fast. It's a new adventure like that every couple of months on top of his working 40-60 hours a week at his day job